Digital photo editing and digital photo editors are common in today's digital photography technology. In digital editing, photographs are typically taken with a digital camera and input directly into a computer for storage and manipulation. Additionally, traditional printed photograph may be digitized using a scanner and also stored and manipulated on a computer. Photos can also be stored and obtained from stock photography databases. With the advent of computers, graphics tablets, and digital cameras, the term photo editing encompasses everything that can be done to a photo in a darkroom or on a computer. Photo editing is most commonly subtle (e.g. alterations to coloring, contrast, so forth), but may be explicit also (e.g. overlaying a head onto a different body, changing a sign's text). Image editing software can be used to apply effects and warp an image in whatever way possible until the desired result is achieved. Image editing software can also be used to create images from scratch for example with tools for drawing or adding text. Sometimes, after photo editing, the resulting image has little or no resemblance to the photo from which it started.
Computer programs are prevalent and easily accessible that allow any computer to be used for digital photo editing. Often times, a standalone software package may be purchased and installed on a personal computer or in a computer networking environment. These conventional software programs allow for digital photos to be manipulated and saved at the local machine in which the photo editing software is running. Thus, a user of personal computer with such photo editing software may easily manipulate any number of digital photos that are also stored at that computer. In this scenario, the task-intensive steps of actual photo manipulation are accomplished by the personal computer.
Further, various networking environments may allow photo editing software to be run at some accessible server computer such that images are manipulated at the server computer at the behest of the connected client computer. In this scenario, the task-intensive steps of actual photo manipulation are accomplished by the server computer that hosts the photo editing software and the client computer merely acts as a controller.
With the advent of web sites and server farms capable of storing a tremendous amount of data, various computer users have begun storing digital photos in online storage services. In this manner, a person may access stored digital photos from any computer that the person may be using. With universal access to stored digital photos, one may upload photos from virtually anywhere and store the digital photos in an online manner. However, well-known and comprehensive photo editing software may only be resident on one personal computer or within a specific network of computers. Thus, even if a person is able to upload and store their newly created digital photos from any computer connected to the internet, the person cannot access their photo editing software to manipulate the newly created and stored digital photos.
What is needed is a software solution that allows a user to take advantage of the ability to upload and store digital photos from any computer connected to the internet such that the user may also exercise an additional ability to edit these digital photos while maintaining the unique relationship between a user and their respective relationships with online storage services.